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MICHAEL HARRINGTON
decided that they should start living in the American utopia instead of
searching for it. Even the remaining radical malcontents were often
reduced to talking about simple decencies, like anti-McCarthyism, rather
than indicting the society as a whole. The grand theories seemed as
nostalgic as a song from the Spanish Civil War.
Somewhere in the last years of the Eisenhower stalemate, the
Sixties began. With the exception of the tremendous burst of Negro
energy, the event did not take place in public.
It
was a revival of
radical thought. Writers like Galbraith, Swados, and Riesman raised
fundamental questions about the allocation of resources, the miseries of
the factory, the options of foreign policy. On the New Frontier, the
speech-writers participated in this spirit even if the men of power did
not.
In
short, it once more became possible-and even fashionable-to
have a large idea.
David Bazelon's
The Paper Economy
is an extremely important
moment in the new mood.
It
is an astute, muck-raking, and angry
exposition of some of the more important structual idiocies of American
life.
It
poses big choices.
Since I intend to take respectful issue with one of Bazelon's
basic ideas, let me start with a frank statement of how good the book
is. The central theme is both simple and devastating: in pragmatic
America, outmoded ideas are more real than present things.
Why does the automobile industry sacrifice men to machines in
order to be able to make nine million cars, knowing all the while that
there is no market for this capacity, and thus consuming workers and
production lines for nothing? How did the nation decide to subsidize
the urban chaos which is the most successful by-product of the auto
industry? And most radically, why isn't that productivity used for some
good end? America responds to these practical, common-sense questions
with theories about Free Enterprise, private property, stock-holder
democracy and the like. These are, of course, utterly irrelevant descrip–
tions of a corporate, monopoly, price-administered and state-subsidized
economy. As a result, Bazelon concludes, the decision makers are more
concerned "with tending a balance sheet than meeting quotas of
production."
Occasionally, a catastrophe intrudes into the idyll and a modicum
of sanity becomes imperative. Bazelon cites World War II as a persua–
sive case in point. After ten years of prostration, the American economy
succeeded, in the space of four years, in producing forty-five percent of
all the military hardware in the world and raising the standard of
living at the same time. However, as soon as the danger passed, the
